(Patreon) "Why My Page Was Put Under Review"

[random.person]

Child pornography in any form and/or medium should be banned regardless if it's fictional or not... Even showing child like drawings in a pornographic way should be banned, because it's just a stupid attempt to get away with circumventing the law, regardless if it's creatively described as not being a child... Just resembling it should be enough to be considered offensive and unlawful, because it is wrong on every level to even attempt to have that kind of content, implied or not...

Not that I'm saying yours does... I have no clue...

The matter is vastly more complicated than this. The criminalization of the conduct of producing material depicting minors in a sexualized way is not a trivial matter, for it's a compression of the freedom of artistic expression, which in western modern societies is usually guaranteed at a constitutional level. The point then becomes which underlying value are to be protected through said criminalization and the answer here is not trivial either. In certain juridical systems the lawmaker cannot criminalize at will, but must respect certain prerequisites of criminal law.
For instance, in my country the laws about pedopornography have been interpreted to be protective of the minors depicted, so if the image has no semblance of a real minor it is not illicit. This happens because in our juridical system crimes are required to be concretely offensive.
It could be questioned why it is this way and the answer is that this idea of a concrete offence as the basis for criminalization is linked to the guarantee against the possibility for the State to punish conducts which are expressive of one's personality but are not harmful in any concrete way.
Lastly, there exist people who appear younger than they are, so a law dictating that the mere semblance of a naked minor is not to be depicted would be unrational as it would prevent them from taking or from having others take pictures of themselves.

 

[a meme]

Why spend time making a good game when you can just press a button and eliminate the competition?

 

[Boom's Attic Games]

Hello All.

Okay.... Where to start.....

My page was put under review due to the Character "Chloe" in the game "Research Into Corruption" appearing to look like a minor.
This is the only reason my page was put under review, no other reason for what I am aware.

I can understand why the "Patreon Trust and Safety team" took this action because let's face it...
The said Character does, in fact, look like a minor even if this isn't actually the case.

I removed all Content of this said character from my page, these include the "About, Rewards and Posts section"
I mistakingly thought this was the only thing that I had to remove in order to restore my page.

After speaking with the "Patreon Trust and Safety team" again I was asked to update said character "Chloe" in the game as well.
" This would take around 2Months of work as I would have to re-do well over 1k images.
My page wouldn't be back online until this action was taken.
" You need to understand that the support I get from my Patreon page is the only income I have right now "

The Future :

Spoiler: The Future

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So I replied to the "Patreon Trust and Safety team" with an alternative, that alternative being :

Hi,

Regarding Updating the said character in the game.
Which Would take roughly 2months for me to do, and with this being my only source of income I can't have my page offline for that long.

Is it possible for me to do the alternate below instead?

I've been planning on creating a new game and giving the old game,
"the game that is in question" and the development of it to someone else.

I'll Remove All Images, Posts, and content of said game from Patreon and start with a clean slate with the new game.
" I've already started doing this by removing every post on my page as well as removing the header image"

I won't mention the game in question on my page again, nor will post any content/links about the said game either.

The only thing that I would like to do once my page is back online is to make a post to my supporters to let them know what Is happening going forward and what will be happing with the Old game. the post will contain no Content/Links.

Is this at all possible?

I've now sent this email and I'm now just waiting for a reply.
Thank you to everyone for taking the time to read this.

 

[anne O'nymous]

One thing to glean from all this.. Patreon isn't run right. Plain and simple.

Is this surprising ?
Guidelines rules are legal documents, they should be explicit on what's permit and what's not... which isn't the case with their part regarding Games of Throne and Lolita. Basically speaking, they just said that "this" is now banned, except when it's not banned.
On top of this, when he answered to the open letter, what Jack Conte (Patreon owner) said goes against what's wrote in the said rules, was different to what we could have witnessed at this time, and also goes at the opposite of what the chief of Patreon legal team said few days before.

 

[random.person]

Wow, this sucks.

The new development for RIC means there won't be pubblic releases then, not even on other sites?

 

[khumak]

As far as underage content goes I'm actually suprised that the stated age of the character matters at all. They're not real. The apparent age of the charadter in the render is what should matter. If the dev says they're 18 but they look 12 then they're 12, not 18 IMO. That's how I would enforce it anyway if I were in charge of that. There's a lot of games on this site that would fail that test for me, including some popular ones like DMD.

 

[Sphere42]

As far as underage content goes I'm actually suprised that the stated age of the character matters at all. They're not real. The apparent age of the charadter in the render is what should matter. If the dev says they're 18 but they look 12 then they're 12, not 18 IMO. That's how I would enforce it anyway if I were in charge of that. There's a lot of games on this site that would fail that test for me, including some popular ones like DMD.

How would that even work IRL? While rare some people look vastly younger than their actual age and others a fair bit older. By what right do you restrict the personal rights of a 19-year-old who looks 15, or deem an "early bloomer" 13-year-old not worthy of protection?

And then in fiction you get all kinds of additional complications such as inhuman aging, body swapping, aliens or fantasy creatures with completely different cultural norms plus the fact NONE OF IT IS REAL! Or are you arguing for a ban on all fictional depictions of all acts which would be illegal if performed in real life?

 

[polywog]

How would that even work IRL? While rare some people look vastly younger than their actual age and others a fair bit older. By what right do you restrict the personal rights of a 19-year-old who looks 15, or deem an "early bloomer" 13-year-old not worthy of protection?

And then in fiction you get all kinds of additional complications such as inhuman aging, body swapping, aliens or fantasy creatures with completely different cultural norms plus the fact NONE OF IT IS REAL! Or are you arguing for a ban on all fictional depictions of all acts which would be illegal if performed in real life?

 

[khumak]

How would that even work IRL? While rare some people look vastly younger than their actual age and others a fair bit older. By what right do you restrict the personal rights of a 19-year-old who looks 15, or deem an "early bloomer" 13-year-old not worthy of protection?

And then in fiction you get all kinds of additional complications such as inhuman aging, body swapping, aliens or fantasy creatures with completely different cultural norms plus the fact NONE OF IT IS REAL! Or are you arguing for a ban on all fictional depictions of all acts which would be illegal if performed in real life?

They have to draw the line somewhere. Sure there are some people in real life who look younger than they really are, and in those cases they can actually prove their age via identification. In fact that probably explains some of the popularity for certain porn stars who look young for their age. Stars like Jenna Haze for example look like they could be in high school (to me at least). So they can make porn with stars like that set in a high school without getting into any trouble. They could use stars that look older but it's just not believable because they just don't look young enough.

There's no documentation to check for fictional characters though. You can't prove their age because they don't exist so how old they look in the renders is the only real indication of their age. There's no real world birth certificate, driver's license, etc to use for documentation. If simply stating their age is all you need to do then you can have people literally fucking babies and just say they're freaks of nature who never aged for some reason.

You could do migdget porn I guess, but that's a RL condition and people with that condition tend to have a distictive look to them. They don't look especially young, they just look like normal adults squished down to a smaller size so I doubt a game that focused on midgets who actually look like midgets would satisfy people who want games focusing on sex with people who look younger than usual.

This is probably why some enforcers just reflexively reject anything in a school setting. They've given up on trying to enforce some age limit since people are trying to skirt the rules so they restrict the setting instead. Personally, I won't play anything where the renders look like they're in elementary school. I don't care what the dev says their age is. If they look like little kids I'm not interested.

That doesn't mean the enforcers always get it right. There are banned games like Teacher's Pet where I thought the age of the characters in the renders looked fine regardless what the setting was or what their stated age was. Most of those characters looked plausible for a high school senior with the possible exception of the flat chested blond girl. That one looked somewhat questionable to me although I wouldn't have made an issue of it. She was close enough. I think the main issue for the enforcers for that game was incest though which is the main issue where the enforcers are getting things wrong.

There's literally no way to enforce a no incest rule. Just like there's no real world documentation to prove age for a fictional character, the same is true for relationships, and unlike with age there is no way to discern a character's relationship to another character from a render. So it doesn't matter whether you like incest or not, it's simply not enforceable. You can stop people from referencing incest in the original text, but if people want to make an incest game, they're going to do it. They'll just set the text of the game up in such a way that it's easy to add an incest patch and then either leak their own incest patch or just wait for some fan with minimal coding skill to make one for them.

 

[Sphere42]

There's no documentation to check for fictional characters though. You can't prove their age because they don't exist so how old they look in the renders is the only real indication of their age. There's no real world birth certificate, driver's license, etc to use for documentation. If simply stating their age is all you need to do then you can have people literally fucking babies and just say they're freaks of nature who never aged for some reason.

Fictional characters do not qualify for "personhood" in the legal sense. If they did anyone playing a shooter, MOBA or the like would be guilty of mass murder. To me "the line" is pretty clear: "were real people harmed in the making of the product?" - "harm" also includes violation of privacy and identity rights so modeling a sex scene after a real child would still be illegal (and minors cannot consent to allowing it!) as would modeling a shooter avatar after a real adult without their permission.

Personally, I won't play anything where the renders look like they're in elementary school. I don't care what the dev says their age is. If they look like little kids I'm not interested.

You do you, absolutely no judgment there. What I take issue with is trying to force your own views and values upon others.

There's literally no way to enforce a no incest rule. Just like there's no real world documentation to prove age for a fictional character, the same is true for relationships, and unlike with age there is no way to discern a character's relationship to another character from a render. So it doesn't matter whether you like incest or not, it's simply not enforceable. You can stop people from referencing incest in the original text, but if people want to make an incest game, they're going to do it. They'll just set the text of the game up in such a way that it's easy to add an incest patch and then either leak their own incest patch or just wait for some fan with minimal coding skill to make one for them.

Incest bans are easy to enforce reactively via manual review. But why should fictional incest be banned? Why should real incest between consenting adults be banned as long as they do not have babies together? Coercion, grooming and other abuses of power/mentoring dynamics should be punished independently of any blood relations.

I'm more conflicted on zoophilia because there the definitions of "consent" and "victim" become blurry. I think there are some "obviously willing" cases such as a dog mounting someone without training or drugs but other than that we don't understand how animals think well enough to judge. Anyone willing to eat meat has no right to oppose it though, mass slaughter is still worse than the occasional maybe-rape.

 

[khumak]

Incest bans are easy to enforce reactively via manual review. But why should fictional incest be banned? Why should real incest between consenting adults be banned as long as they do not have babies together? Coercion, grooming and other abuses of power/mentoring dynamics should be punished independently of any blood relations.

You're missing my point about incest. I actually do find some types of incest interesting in games even though I would find it repulsive in real life but whether I like it or not doesn't matter. For a game based purely on fictional characters that exist only as renders and text, it's purely a semantics issue. I can make a game where zero characters have any blood relation to any other character in the game based on the code and text in the original game. Then you can make a trivially easy to program patch for that game that turns every character into a blood relative to whoever you want. There's nothing I or anyone else can do to stop you. Legality or preference isn't an issue. The original game didn't have incest so there's nothing to enforce.

The only situation where I could see enforcing an incest ban is if the dialog for the game focused so heavily on incest that it just didn't make any sense if someone who was not a blood relative was substituted. For instance if characters are constantly dwelling on the fact that they can't have sex because you're "my landlady" or something, that just doesn't make any sense because nobody cares about that IRL. But having a character that sometimes refers to you with a nickname like say Bill instead of William? Nothing they can do about that. And writing code that changes Bill, to bro or brother is trivial and again nothing they can do about it. Nicknames wouldn't even have to be present in the original game although that would make a patch harder to do.

The only way to prevent that would be to have a rule that no game can have more than 1 character. Then obviously there's nobody else to potentially be related to. Otherwise, some modder can make the milkman my dad or my landlady my mom or my boss my sister or whatever they want. There are a few minor things they can do to to make it slightly more annoying to make the incest patch, like banning games that have incest in the original code and it's still there but just disabled or banning games where there are configurable nicknames that would be easy to change to mom/dad/bro/sis/whatever but that just means the incest patch won't be quite so trivial to write. It'll still get written unless the game is just a total dud.

Any other type of rule they might try to impose that is mostly based on the text/code/dialog would be similarly unenforceable for anyone determined modder. But if the renders appear to violate the rule that's a different matter. For instance if there's a rule against bestiality and there are zero events in the game which include that, but there ARE renders for it then that would be pretty obviously meant to violate that rule based on some patch or update later on and would be easily enforceable.

Personally, if I were an enforcer I wouldn't even load up the game I would just unpack the image libraries and look through the gallery. If any images appeared to violate the rules, ban. If not, green light. Wouldn't care what was actually in the game.

 

[Sphere42]

Then you can make a trivially easy to program patch for that game that turns every character into a blood relative to whoever you want. There's nothing I or anyone else can do to stop you. Legality or preference isn't an issue. The original game didn't have incest so there's nothing to enforce.

That patch would be illegal and anyone found in possession of it or distributing it could be held liable. Exactly the same as having even a non-pornographic game and manually substituting all image assets with actual RL CP.

Personally, if I were an enforcer I wouldn't even load up the game I would just unpack the image libraries and look through the gallery. If any images appeared to violate the rules, ban. If not, green light. Wouldn't care what was actually in the game.

You seem to be far too hung up on online enforcement by private parties. Actual law enforcement can obtain warrants to search hard drives and will go through with a fine comb if they have any reason to do so. In fact since civil servants aren't always the most tech-literate people they're more likely to just boot up the game and see what happens and if you have that patch installed RIP you.

Legality and corporate ToS are two VERY different concepts. In principle a platform like Patreon or Youtube could simply deem anything pertaining to, say, ducks objectionable and ban anyone posting such material. This would not be a violation of free speech rights and you would never go to jail for posting even the prettiest duck-filled pond on the entire internet. And many ToS are written so they don't even need a reason to ban you, although if you pay for an ongoing service those might be overruled by local consumer protection laws.

 

[Benn Swagger]

It seem someone didn't know the difference between Lolicon and Underage. Although I don't mind Loli & Futa & Gay content be banned from this site, and exclusive only for straight Incest Harem. Ban vanilla theme too, it's boring.